Beverly Apple, Old Bethpage homemaker, dies

It might seem a bit cruel, a bit harsh, but Gail Gardner admits to laughing at her mother all those years.

"She was just very, very funny and she did not know she was funny," Gardner said about her mother, Beverly Apple, who for 53 years was an Old Bethpage homemaker.

Apple died Dec. 23 at a Babylon nursing home after complications of heart surgery, family said. She was 85.

More than a week after her death, her mother's quirky personality and naivete made her daughter laugh. Her son, too.

"She reminded me of Edith Bunker of 'All In The Family,' who said all those ditsy things," said her son, Gary Apple, a Manhattan writer for television shows. "But then she'd come up with something sage, something wise."

Apple was born in Brooklyn and raised by an older sister, her daughter said. "She was protected, and maybe that's why she was so naive."

Once, when Gail Gardner was in high school, she came home to find her mother singing what sounded like an Italian song.

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"In a soprano, she was singing the same word, over and over," said Gardner of West Babylon. The word was a slang Italian vulgarity.

"I said, 'Ma, do you know what you're saying?' "

When Gardner shared the translation her mother got mad at her "because she said I was the only person she could have gotten it from."

Apple also was a shopper who couldn't pass on a bargain.

In the late 1980s, when Gardner first started dating her husband, Robert, he arrived at their front door, telling Gardner he thought he had just seen her mother driving with a couch strung to the roof of her car.

It turned out Apple had just gotten a deal on a new love seat and pulled into the driveway seconds after her future son-in-law. Then she made him quickly help get the love seat into the house.

"She made us hurry before my father got home," Gail Gardner said, "because even if he didn't like the love seat he wouldn't bother to return it once it was in the house."

Apple also was famous with family for her potato latkes and cheese and potato blintzes. "They wouldn't let her into a family gathering unless she had her latkes or blintzes," her son said.

In her later years she and her husband, Jerome, traveled to Europe, Mexico and the Caribbean, all the while her personality helping them make countless friends.

In addition to her children, she is survived by three grandchildren. Her husband died in 2004.

She was buried Thursday at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens.